ANDREW ROBERTS: Theresa May is alarming traditional Tories like me with a manifesto that would have left Thatcher reeling

Theresa May went to Halifax to launch her manifesto on Thursday, a constituency that has voted Labour since 1987 but which will almost certainly go Conservative on June 8.

She emphasised that metaphorically, politically and geographically, the Conservatives are capable of striking deep into Labour territory.

Her manifesto has been hailed as completely cutting the ground from under Jeremy Corbyn and Labour – and so it does. So why am I feeling queasy?

Theresa May went to Halifax to launch her manifesto on Thursday, a constituency that has voted Labour since 1987 but which will almost certainly go Conservative on June 8

Although Mrs May is a Conservative, she is no Tory. This manifesto fires shot after shot at the philosophy of Toryism in a way that would have left Stanley Baldwin, Margaret Thatcher and Lord Salisbury reeling.

The entire foreword could have been written by Tony Blair, and the programme of social engineering that the manifesto promises would have left aghast ‘wet’ Tory Premiers such as Churchill, Macmillan and Heath.

Conservatives, according to Mrs May, have ‘a belief not just in society but the good that government can do’.

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Mrs Thatcher, of course, never said ‘there is no such thing as society,’ but she was adamant that governments should get out of the way and let individuals thrive.

In this manifesto we learn that Conservatives ‘reject the cult of selfish individualism’. They might reject individualism, but Tories don’t.

It has been the individual, not the community let alone the State, that has produced the advances that have secured the dignity of man. Tories believe it is only through the rights of individuals that the rest of society can function properly at all.

Her manifesto has been hailed as completely cutting the ground from under Jeremy Corbyn and Labour – and so it does. So why am I feeling queasy? asks Andrew Roberts

The manifesto also attacks what it calls ‘social division’, which merely means the natural state of society, which is split into classes and groupings. Thatcher instinctively understood how social mobility through meritocracy was the spur to self-advancement, but one shouldn’t despise the class one was trying to enter.

It is Mrs May’s wholehearted embrace of the concept of classlessness, once proposed by John Major, that is extraordinarily utopian, especially coming from someone who states: ‘We see rigid dogma and ideology not just as needless but dangerous.’

In fact, ideology gave Mrs Thatcher a strong north star to guide by – invaluable for a Prime Minister.

The attacks on ‘the privileged few’ in the manifesto – by which is meant the high-earners, or wealth generators – are unworthy in a party that denounces Corbyn’s politics of envy.

The plan to expel members of the House of Lords for ‘poor conduct’ is another un-Tory example of the State choosing who can speak and vote in our legislature – something that would not look out of place in Cuba or China.

Classlessness is a chimera not achieved by any free society, and it won’t come in a Britain that retains its public schools

The endless concentration on victimhood – ‘If you are at a state school… If you are black… If you are a woman’ and the references to ‘white working-class boys’ – was used by Blair to atomise society, but shouldn’t have found a place in a Conservative document. Nor is it true that the ‘just about managing’ class have been ‘ignored’, since every politician has wooed the C1 and C2s from Thatcher to Blair. Remember ‘white van man’?

Classlessness is a chimera not achieved by any free society, and it won’t come in a Britain that retains its public schools.

Mrs May’s plan to force the 100 top public school heads to set up academies as well as doing their actual jobs is another promised exercise in social engineering that sounds good in a political manifesto. But it is as un-Tory as her ‘unprecedented audit of racial disparity’ and her commitment to remain a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The paragraphs on climate change, gender pay gaps, further business regulations and forcing companies to give a year’s leave for carers, let alone for ‘the most ambitious programme of investment in the NHS ever seen’, could have been written by Alastair Campbell for the 1997 Labour manifesto.

Anyone hoping Brexit might be the start of a great deregulation drive that could make us the Singapore of the Atlantic should know that, under Mrs May, ‘workers’ rights that were conferred on British citizens from our membership of the EU will remain’.

Mrs May refers to herself as a Conservative, but if this anti-business, politically correct, profoundly un-Tory manifesto is enacted, it will soon be perceived that she is in fact on the centre-Left of British politics.

Conservatism has sometimes been defined as being whatever the Conservative Party wants to do at the time; Toryism, by contrast, has a long and proud history of principled opposition to the extension of State power over the individual, joint-stock companies, the legislature and institutions such as public schools.

I have on my desk my postal vote, and I will shortly be casting it for Mrs May’s party, because the only alternative Prime Minister is utterly unconscionable. Of course it may well be that the manifesto is part of a brilliant ploy to push Labour out of British politics altogether after 117 years by denying it any central ground whatsoever. If so, then Mrs May should be congratulated.

But if she means to do what she has written, traditional Tories like me should be almost as worried as the socialists.